Gilbert Doctorow discusses the political unrest in Belarus, where opposition protesters are demanding a new round of elections after President Lukashenko claimed to have won 80% of the vote this most recent time around. Lukashenko has served as president for 26 years, and until now, explains Doctorow, has faced very little opposition. Doctorow says there is good reason to believe that Lukashenko remains popular in Belarus—but probably not popular enough to explain an apparent 80% electoral...

Scott talks to David Stockman about the economic fallout from the coronavirus lockdowns. Stockman points out all the devastation that has already been wrought by the government so far—relating to both the lockdowns and to the rampant stimulus measures meant to address the fallout of the lockdowns themselves. This, Stockman believes, could be the event that triggers the bursting of the bubble that has been inflating since the last crash in 2008. This time, though, the economy is in an even...

Ted Snider discusses the many foreign policy betrayals that have already taken place under the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first moves in office—and indeed one of his biggest campaign promises—was to withdraw from the JCPOA, an agreement that did little except to make certain that any excuse for war between the U.S. and Iran was taken off the table. Trump similarly sabotaged peace talks with North Korea by insisting on complete nuclear disarmament before America followed through with...

Scott and Gareth Porter discuss Charlie Savage’s shameful reporting on the recent Russian bounties story. In this case Savage, whom Scott and Porter actually regard as one of the better journalists at the New York Times, published a story laying out the allegations from the CIA, but without corroborating them. Scott views this as journalistic malpractice of the greatest degree, since the Times story led the way for all the other major outlets to start reporting on it as though the scandal were...

Ammon Bundy discusses his reasons for endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement and their move to defund police departments across America. Bundy, of course, was involved in a standoff with the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing rights in 2014, a fiasco that resulted in jail time and widespread media slander for Bundy, before his name was completely cleared when a federal judge finally forced the truth to come out. Bundy has come to realize that many of the efforts to divide people...

Scott talks to Danny Sjursen about Lebanon, which has been in the news recently after a disastrous, and apparently accidental, explosion left hundreds dead there. Today Sjursen discusses Lebanon’s past, a history that has seen it become a battleground for many proxy wars throughout the Middle East. He deflates some of the most common myths about the country, including the idea that Hezbollah is a transnational terrorist group controlled by Iran. In reality, he explains, Hezbollah is a...

Jordan Smith discusses her research into the “BlueLeaks” archive of the leaked personal data of hundreds of thousands of cops and their cases. Smith was looking for evidence of unscientific techniques that the police use to elicit confessions and get convictions—and she found them in abundance. It turns out that the use of coercive interrogation techniques, discredited pseudoscience and phony forensic methods has become common practice in America’s law enforcement agencies for decades. Smith...

Scott talks to Branko Marcetic about Kamala Harris’ dismal foreign policy. Although she’s frequently portrayed as a progressive leftist, when it comes to foreign policy, says Marcetic, her foreign policy is right in line with the Clinton-Bush-Obama establishment policies we’ve come to know over the last few decades. Part of the reason for this is that Harris has connections to the usual big think tanks, which are tied to former presidential administrations and to the arms industry. There’s big...

Grant Smith joins the show for another look at the Virginia Israel Advisory Board, a government entity associated with the state of Virginia that allocates taxpayer money to Israeli companies starting operations in the U.S. The projects, Smith explains, aren’t viable on their own, or else they wouldn’t need the massive subsidies from the public sector—but after getting the money, they can often put local competitors out of business because of their unnatural advantage. When these projects do...

Scott talks to Dan McAdams about the precarious situation in Belarus, where some western agitators are seeking to use the country’s recent presidential elections as an excuse to foment and support a revolution. McAdams reminds us that although Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko, might not be a great guy, it doesn’t justify regime change—most of the time, in fact, when America gets involved in these kinds of conflicts, the people that take over after the revolution end up being much worse...

Max Blumenthal discusses the case of Kong Tsung-gan, an “expert source” on the ground in Hong Kong, who has been quoted by many American media outlets in recent months as an authority on the separatist movement there. The problem? Kong is actually an American named Brian Kern masquerading on the internet as a native. The mainstream media, explains Blumenthal, has been happy to go along unquestioningly with Kern’s story because his narrative suits theirs: China is an oppressive and violent...

Dan McKnight discusses recent efforts by his organization, BringOurTroopsHome.US, to get Republicans in congress to distance themselves from Liz Cheney. Cheney wields enormous influence in congress, both because of her last name and because she supports the reelection campaigns of a whole slew of congressmen. But her brand is utterly toxic, McKnight explains, and continued association with the Cheney name, he thinks, is likely to move the Republican party in a bad direction. It’s time that...

Scott talks to Michael Klare about the incentives behind America’s involvement in wars in the Middle East. One common narrative says that Bush invaded Iraq simply because America needed the oil—the truth, says Klare, is somewhat more complicated. He explains that American war planners see a combined strategic interest in U.S. involvement in the Middle East that includes military positioning and the economic interest of exerting control over the oil trade. For one thing, America has essentially...

Brett Wilkins discusses the story about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that everyone learned in school: the U.S. was forced to drop the atomic bombs, because the alternative would have meant a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost a million American lives. In reality, Japan was already making moves toward negotiating a surrender, especially after the USSR declared war on Japan earlier that summer. What’s more, seven out of eight U.S. generals at the time, including Eisenhower and MacArthur,...

Kingston Reif talks about the imminent lapse of the New START treaty, one of the last remaining nuclear safeguard agreements between the U.S. and Russia. Russia has made some moves to renegotiate the treaty, but the Trump administration has refused to do so, ostensibly in the name of making it much more restrictive, and of including China in the negotiations. These efforts would be admirable, Reif notes, except that there is little reason to believe they are legitimate. Reif suspects that the...